Hey everyone!
I have been thinking about devlogs and progress reports recently. I decided that I want to post written devlogs more regularly (biweekly) and video devlogs only on bigger events or updates. I want to keep these write-ups brief and juicy, so let's dive right in.
Flask Re-Drawing Mechanic
Over the last couple of weeks, I got quite some feedback from people who played the game for the first time. Some of them said that fighting was fun, but they felt it got repetitive after a few hours. There is a lot of depth and possibilities for different builds, so I think the problem is that I am not encouraging players enough to experiment with all the possibilities already in the game. I will address that with various changes over the next weeks. In the end, I also want to make a new tutorial to familiarize players with all the abilities they have at their disposal beside throwing explosive flasks and simply blowing up enemies.
The first change is a re-drawing mechanic. You have 2 fixed flasks and 3 random flasks at you disposal. The 3 random flasks are drawn from your "deck" of 10 flasks in your cauldron. To have control over their "hand" of 3 flasks, players tended to only put 3 flasks into their deck. To encourage branching out, I implemented a mechanic that lets you re-draw your hand when using a Juicified Liquid flask.
This way, you do not necessarily have to use a flask and waste resources on it, just to free up a drawing slot. We have to do some testing on this, but it feels like a good change right now. It should give players agency and opportunities for strategic decision-making.
Fog of War
Game development is a process of iterating. We go over things again and again until they feel satisfying for the time being. For me, one of these never-ending stories is maps. After my last update the square nature of the tiles made the local map look a bit unpolished. So I went over the system again visually and mechanically and man, it feels a lot better now.
We now have two stages of discovery. You discover a large circular area around you. When moving out of a discovered area, a fog of war creeps back. Discovered special places stay visible though.
Before:
After:
Please note that these changes are on our internal testing branch only and not yet on the public playtest version on Steam.
That is it for today, thank you for reading and have a nice weekend and maybe stop by on our Discord server!